Old City String Quartet member comes from Mountain Brook home filled with music

The Pajaro-van de Stadt's Mountain Brook living room often vibrates with classical music. An arrangement of Astor Piazzolla's 'Oblivion' gets a run-through from daughter Flavia, left, father Octavio, and son Adrian. (The Birmingham News / Joe Songer)

One of the family photos in the Pajaro-van de Stadt's Mountain Brook living room stands out among the rest.

Oldest daughter Milena is all smiles, standing next to conductor Seiji Ozawa, one of several famed musicians with whom she has collaborated (others include Christoph Eschenbach, Alan Gilbert, Itzhak Perlman and Joseph Silverstein). Already making a mark in the classical world at age 21, Milena has racked up competition victories, received high-powered training at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and helped to found the Old City String Quartet, the award-winning ensemble that performs at Altamont School on Thursday.

But Milena's successes only tell a small part of this overachieving family's story.

Octavio Pajaro is a cardiothoracic surgeon and lung and heart transplant specialist at UAB, trained at Albert Einstein School of Medicine, interned at Johns Hopkins and held a Fulbright at Oxford University. His wife, Dominique Pajaro-van der Stadt, has sung in choruses her whole life. She was born in Brazil of a Dutch father and Franco-Italian mother, and has lived in Angola, Argentina, Holland, Turkey, Italy and Belgium.

Recent Altamont grad Adrian, 18, is about to enter an engineering program at McGill University in Montreal. Flavia, 14, a student at Altamont, has danced in Alabama Ballet's "The Nutcracker." The couple's younger son, Stefan, 16, is a classical guitarist and Altamont student.

But among their divergent interests, the common denominator is music.

Music has bonded them through Octavio's training in Boston, New York, Baltimore and Oxford, his work at the Jacksonville, Fla., campus of the Mayo Clinic, and, for the last three years, at UAB.

At 21, violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, is already making waves in the music world, winning competitions and performing with orchestras in Europe and North America. She has played with the Old City String Quartet since 2008. (Special)

On a recent morning, he was focused on the piano part for Astor Piazzolla's "Oblivion," Flavia and Adrian accompanying on violin and cello. He likened piano playing to his work.

"I think of surgery as a performance," he said. "You want it to be perfect. You think about getting focused, getting in the zone. When I'm doing an operation, I'm seeing things come together and my hands are doing what they need to do. When you're playing an instrument, you're thinking of the music. The ability to focus and feel proud at the end is another art."

Growing up in New York, music was always present in the home.

"My parents were from Colombia," he said. "My dad played quite a few instruments, and he wrote a couple of hundred songs, played guitar and sang. His brother was a very good opera singer, and another brother was a great classical guitarist."

Although he won competitions, played at Carnegie Recital Hall and was broadcast on WNYC at age 16, he had a greater passion for math and science.

"Some of my teachers were trying to push me to go to Juilliard, but I didn't want to give up math and science, so I went to Harvard instead and majored in biochemistry," he recalled.

Octavio met Dominique when they were both students at Harvard.

"Our life revolved around music," Octavio said. "I played the piano for her. We went to see the Boston Symphony. We would go to the library and listen to records."

As a child, Milena would complain when opera singers sang too sharp or the vibrato was too wide.

"She had perfect pitch when she was very young," said Dominique. "She's a great singer and pianist, too."

Adrian picked up the cello before he was 3 years old.

"By the time he was 4, he was playing Suzuki pieces," said Dominique. "He memorizes very fast and has an excellent ear."

Adrian went on to place in the Alabama Symphony's Lois Pickard Scholarship competition, to win the Eunice Hoffmeister Competition in Florence and solo with the Shoals Symphony. He recently spent two months in Nepal, where he volunteered at Orchid Garden, a day care and preschool center for impoverished children.

Despite Flavia's dance aspirations, she plays violin diligently, having won competitions with Birmingham Prelude Strings and at Altamont. Recently she landed a spot in the newly formed Alabama Symphony Youth Orchestra.

"As a dancer, it helps to be a musician," she said. "You can understand the music better. Dancers sometimes don't know where the beginning of the measure is. They don't start from the right beat."

She also has a love for languages, having studied Mandarin Chinese and French, and hopes to begin learning Spanish.

Stefan, who is attending the High School Summer Scholars program at Washington University in St. Louis this month, took up the guitar after seeing a guitar player in the film, "Back to the Future."

"He said, 'I want to play that instrument,' so I got him an acoustic guitar and he's still playing," said Octavio.

Octavio attributes the children's musical achievements partly to television, or rather, the lack of it.

"When they were little, we didn't have cable," he said. "They could turn the television on, but they would get only tons of snow. So they played music all the time together, they listened to CDs and played with them. They would imitate classical, rap, jazz and blues. So much revolved around music."

But Milena is the most intent on making music a career. At age 2, she noticed buskers (street musicians) playing in a park in Oxford.

"She said, 'That's what I want to do.' So we found a violin teacher for her."

She picked up a viola when she was in high school in Jacksonville. Two years later, it became her ticket to Curtis, one of the world's top music schools.

"My violin playing kind of got put to the side because I was so excited about the viola," she said last weekend from the Marlboro Festival in Vermont.

In March, she won first place in the Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition, held on the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea. Part of her reward is a solo recital at Wigmore Hall in London in January.

Although a solo career may be in her future, she is most engaged these days with the Old City String Quartet, which recently won the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, a prestigious event with 125 entrants. In addition to touring, the quartet is also busy making recordings.

"We made the first-ever 3-D Blu-ray recording of classical music," she said, proudly. "Now that I'm so committed to our quartet, I would love to do that. It's very exhilarating. I would always have to put my quartet first."

Even if the rest of the Pajaro-van de Stadt children do not follow in Milena's footsteps, their parents believe the arts have provided a firm life foundation.

"If you appreciate one form of art, you appreciate others as well," said Octavio. "You have to learn some art growing up."